“Because Estamos Gringas”: Raciolinguistic Ideologies in a Bilingual Tutoring Program

• In Event: Critical Approaches to Studying Language Ideologies: Race, Power, and Resistance

Abstract

This study explores raciolinguistic ideologies within a university-community tutoring partnership involving bilingual university students and bilingual middle schoolers. Stemming from the university’s history as a predominantly white institution (PWI), the tutor/student pairings routinely consisted of a white bilingual tutor paired with a bilingual student of color. In this presentation, we explore the racialized language-as-social-processes of these pairings through interviews and observations. Drawing on the framework of raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015), we demonstrate how these ideologies played key roles in tutor/student dynamics, highlighting themes of monolingual momentum, raciolinguistic enregisterment, and linguistic (il)legitimization. This study has implications for bilingual tutoring programs as well as for disrupting the “white savior” dynamics that often characterize such programs.

Authors

• Chris K. Chang-Bacon, University of Virginia

• Christopher Hu, University of Alabama

• Nina R. Schoonover, University of Virginia